I'll Be Seeing You

 

I'm the type of reader who is always on the lookout for my next book. Even when I have plenty of books out from the library or know exactly what I want to read next. What else can I read?

During my evening doomscrolling a few nights ago, I came across a blog post of books a young woman (younger than me, at least) has read during the pandemic. She mentioned a memoir by Elizabeth Berg, an author I know and like. It covers the time when Berg became caregiver for her parents during their final days.

I'm approaching the 7th anniversary of the day when I transitioned from being loving daughter to loving daughter caregiver. This is always a sad time for me. I mean, one day I was just my parents' daughter, talking to them every night to make sure they were doing okay. And the next day I was advocating for my mom at the hospital, reviewing her living will and other documents. At the same time making sure that my dad who had never lived alone would be okay. It was a lot. I think of my life as "before" and "after".

Was this the perfect time to read Berg's memoir, I'll Be Seeing You? Perhaps not. But perhaps yes. It gave me a legitimate reason to climb into bed each night and shed a few tears while reading.

Berg's experience with her parents - and her story - is quite different from my own. Her father was suffering from memory loss and faded very slowly. And her mother had to stoically deal with all that. Berg lived a 7-hour drive from her parents but her sister was local to where the parents lived. They have a brother who lives in Hawaii.

In my case, my parents' ends came very rapidly. My mom had a stroke on March 6 and died on March 25. On April 13, my dad was diagnosed with cancer and he died exactly 4 months later. So not quite 5 months after my mom. Both my brother and I lived flying distance from our parents. I was there for 6 months, flying home once when my (fairly new) husband had surgery and to spend a weekend with a dear friend in California. My brother flew in and out as he could.

So much, however, of what Berg wrote really spoke to me. Her parents had lived in their home for nearly 40 years. She wrote about the attachment to the house, even though she had never lived there. My parents lived in their house for all of the 57 years they'd been married. My mom grew up in that house. I grew up in that house. My kids grew up visiting that house as was the case with Berg's children. She wrote about being the sandwich generation. About what it's like  to be aging herself and closer to the point where her kids might need to care  for her. 

She wrote about visiting her uncle Frank at his nursing home. Shortly before either one of my parents "got sick," I drove them to visit my father's brother in his nursing home. Oh  yes, could I relate!

One thing that Berg wrote about the book was that she hoped her memoir might help others going through the same thing. It is good to know that we're not alone. It reminded me, too, that caring for aging parents as an older adult isn't ideal, but it does mean that we were blessed to have our parents for a good part of our lives.

Then I woke up this morning and saw the following post on Facebook by John Pavlovitz.

That's the thing you learn as you grieve deeply: when you lose someone you love, you lose a bit of you.

You don't simply lose yourself metaphorically or symbolically, but you have stolen away the part of your story that only they knew.

You lose the shared memories you curated.

You lose the you who you were when you were with them.

A part of you dies too, and so you want the person you love returned to you because you want that piece of your identity back—and you know you can't have it.

He linked a blog post. He takes this a whole lot further.

Many times over the past six years I’ve had to contend with a sobering realization: life will never be as good as it was when my father was here.
It will never be that complete.
I’ll never feel that rightness again.
That wholeness can simply not return.
My world now is a less-than substitute of the one where my father was alive.

And being a mere mortal who has no say in the when and where and how of reality, all I can do is be here in this world as it is, be who I am in this altered story that I wish I could rewrite but know I cannot.

We who are mourning in this timeline can only work with the reality handed to us and do the best we can to find gratitude in having once had someone worth missing. 

Mom and Dad, I miss you. Thank you for making me the reader I am. Reading often gives me comfort.